Alwaght- A horrifying videotape which the US, UK and France used as an excuse to strike Syria on Saturday indeed shows patients who overcome by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived not by gas, a senior Syrian doctor told Independent's Journalist.
West Asia correspondent Robert Fisk, in an exclusive report for Independent, cited doctor Assim Rahaibani as saying that the widely circulating video was perfectly genuine but it indeed depicted people suffering from "hypoxia not gas poisoning".
The 58-year old senior Syrian doctor told Robert Fisk, Who visited the clinic at the centre of a global crisis, that “I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss."
Rahaibani went on to explain that "Then someone at the door, a White Helmet, shouted Gas!, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
The Syrian Doctor's remarks echoed those of Syrian officials who denied Damascus involvement in any chemical attack against people, stating that the alleged gas attack was a false flag operation to blame Syrian government that is fighting foreign-sponsored terrorists.
Russia’s Representative at the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Alexander Shulgin in remarks during a meeting of the organization’s executive council on Monday accused British spy services and their American counterparts of orchestrating recent chemical attack.
"We have not just a ‘high level of confidence,’ as our Western partners uniformly put it; we have irrefutable proof that there was no chemical attack in Douma on April 7,” Shulgin said, described the incident as a “pre-planned false-flag attack by the British security services, which could have also been aided by their allies in Washington".
The alleged chemical attack in Douma was staged by “pseudo-humanitarian NGOs,” which are under the patronage of the Syrian government’s foreign adversaries, he added.
Shulgin also stressed that Russian military specialists had found “not a single piece of evidence” substantiating the Western claims about the Douma incident.
The Syrian government had absolutely no reason to conduct a gas attack on Douma when the city was already almost liberated from grip of militants, and thus the anti-Damascus accusations look “absurd,” he added.
The Russian official further denounced the tripartite April 14 “military aggression” on Syria, saying “this crime can be by no means justified".
Washington, London and Paris “are playing the hypocrite as they pretend to be the defenders of the international law. In fact, however, no one except for their allies… has any doubts that the major threat to the world comes from these ‘leaders’ of the Western [political] camp,” he pointed out.
"In fact, if they say they bombed storehouse with chemical weapons and there are no traces of chemical contamination that proves the fact that their version of secret chemical stockpiles in hands of the Syrian governmental forces has been obviously made up,” Shulgin said.
He also concluded that the US and its allies are not interested in a real investigation into the alleged Douma gas attack.
Patients have ‘no symptoms of chemical poisoning’
Meanwhile, an intern medic at a Douma hospital stressed that no symptoms of chemical poisoning was found in the patients brought in after the alleged chemical attack.
Marwan Jaber said that following the Douma incident, a group of unidentified people came to the hospital and started to spread panic about a chemical attack.
"Some injured people and unidentified personnel stormed in and spreading message of chemical attack. People were terrified and a panic was triggered. We diagnosed them, there were no related symptoms,” he said.
